Tuesday, April 4, 2017

A Flower Crown For Any Fandom: A DIY

Today I wanted to show you how to make the flower crown I created for the Beauty and the Beast movie premiere. The awesome thing about this craft is that it can be adapted to literally ANY fandom.

First the supply list. You will need...

Grapevine wire from the flower section of your local craft store. This is the kind I used:

Flowers in your choice of color and shape. I chose a small inexpensive hydrangea bloom, because it was made of many smaller blooms I could take apart for a delicate crown (inexpensively...I like cheap crafts). Half of the blooms were taken off the hydrangea when I took this photo:

You'll also need 5 or more pre-made glass marble magnets (well, without the magnet parts...so just the glass bead) with your choice of images on there. Marble magnet tutorials are all over the internet, like this one. When I made mine, I just used white craft glue and printed out images. Trace the glass bead around your image, cut it out, stick some craft glue on the flat bottom of your glass bead, and press the whole thing together. Voila. Super easy. :)

You will also need
-A glue gun with glue sticks
-The aforementioned scissors or wire cutters

I pulled the red flowers off my silk hydrangea flower. I prefer to pull the blooms off rather than cutting them off. Most inexpensive silk flowers have blooms that "pop" off the wire stem easily enough.

I then laid out the design on the table to get a vague idea of how I wanted the flower crown to look. The marble magnets were just rested on top of the blooms for this photo.

The next step is to use your hot glue to glue the glass marbles to the centers of the blossoms. A little tip here...for the first one I did, I pushed down too hard on the bloom, pushing the petals out awkwardly. As seen here:

For the next one, I let the petals stay curled together, and only gently rested the marble with its glue in the center.

The next step is to cut as much of the plastic off the back of your blooms as possible. This is the area that will be pressed against your head when you make your flower crown, and those poky little plastic pieces can get itchy.

Take your floral wire and measure a length that fits comfortably around your head at the level where you'd like it to rest. Cut the wire, with enough leftover to be able to twist back on itself in a loop at the back, seen below:

Now it's just a matter of using your hot glue gun, gluing, burning your fingers, getting annoyed at all the hot glue cobweb wisps that get all over everything as you work, and gluing your flowers one at a time to the wire. I put down my five blooms with the beads first, leaving space between for the other plain blooms, to make sure they were spaced well. I started with the beaded bloom that would rest at the center of my forehead in front.

And that's it! As I said, it's a fun craft that is easily adaptable to literally any fandom, as you can make your glass beads with any images you find and print out, in any flower colors and combinations.